I am not one of those people who decorate for holidays. No fall wreaths on the door come October, no bowls of decorative Easter Eggs on the sideboard in April or green Jell-o desserts on St Paddy’s Day.  Most of the year I can get away with this but at Christmas people find it shocking. Every person over my threshold after the first weekend in December invariably asks, “Where’s your tree?” So I explain about not wanting to kill even sustainably harvested trees and create fire hazards in the living room and spill water on the Ikea laminate flooring and that the kids are so small that ornaments would be a safety hazard and besides I don’t own any ornaments and we’re going to be on the East Coast starting on the 21st and…it all washes right over them.  “You have to get a tree,” they pronounce, in tones of absolute finality.  “For the kids. Everyone has a tree. It’s not Christmas without a tree.”

“They’re right,” my husband will say, after the door shuts behind every tree-happy visitor.  “Everyone has a tree.  Even the Jews next door have a tree.”

“Um,” I usually reply, looking over the edge of my laptop, or up from the floor where I am mopping up dried applesauce, or over from the couch where I am reading Ping to the kids for the 99th time.  “You go right ahead.”  But somehow my participation seems critical to getting it done and I just don’t prioritize holiday décor.  I am Type A about enough things in my life that I can live with my lack of holiday decorating ambition.  I put a dried wreath up on the front door back in November as my token offering to the season. It’ll get shoved on a shelf in the garage sometime before Valentine’s Day, missing a few more plastic berries and manufactured twigs, and I’m ok with that.

Back east for the holidays, the selection, erection, and decoration of the tree was a major event at both grandparental gatherings.  While there is something magical about a well decorated Christmas tree, I was grateful to get on a plane and fly away from the post- Christmas cleanup ritual of picking pine needles and sap balls out of the rug, dealing with murky tree water and untangling light strings.   Back in California, I found a box of secondhand tree ornaments on the front porch. They were a thoughtful Christmas gift from the aforementioned Jews next door, who apparently think we lack Christmas spirit and ought to get a tree next year.

All this got me thinking:  Am I a Grinch? Am I the only mom in the world so lacking in holiday spirit as to NOT get and decorate some kind of tree for the holidays?  Aren’t there other moms out there who are avoiding the tree ritual because they don’t have the time, the space, the desire, the sheer holiday energy to take on the whole tree thing when they are already baking and wrapping and cooking and shopping? Am I alone?

Turns out- I am alone.  The only people who don’t have a Christmas tree are a) on antidepressants that clearly aren’t working, b) homeless, c) about to be abandoned by their feckless parents, d) victims of a natural disaster, or e) completely broke, in which case they are advised to decorate a houseplant or a build their own tree out of scrap wood. One of the greatest things about Web 2.0 is that you never really feel alone. There’s always someone else’s reality to immerse yourself in, a blog, a video, a flickstream, a twitter stream. There are people out there making aircraft out of bic pens and filming transgender OK GO tribute videos and raising worms on organic raisins. Somehow this awesome display of  variety usually makes me marvel at the sheer range and exuberance of human endeavor, makes me glad to be a part of it all.  This is first time it has made me feel completely alone.

Time to go scoop up some Christmas ornaments in the post holiday sales, I guess.

My sister-in-law needed someone to talk to.  She sought me out at a holiday gathering last week, pulled me aside, and as if in a confessional, admitted,  “I canceled my Facebook account.”

It was just becoming too much. A bunch of old high school people that she never wanted to talk to again were trying to friend her.  The “pending friend request” list was getting longer.  She felt anxious that she hadn’t posted anything in weeks, while everyone else was adding photos every day, and giving her digital gifts.  Some friends were driving her crazy with their gossip, but could she un-friend them?  Do they receive an announcement saying, “You’ve just been un-friended by Jesse”?

It was all too much.

So on the final screen in the close-your-account process, she was surprised and hugely relieved to see: “social stress” as one the possible reason codes.  That’s what she checked.

She’s not alone.  We humans are programmed to need and seek connection.  Social networking taps into that.  But a million friends on MySpace do not necessarily make you a happy and integrated person.  It just takes us a while to realize that.  It seems there are a few distinct phases in the social networking adoption curve / lifecycle:

1. The New Shiny Object Phase.  This is the phase where anticipation and expectations are high.  You invest time in customizing your pages and profiles and are very proud to be “plugged in”.
2. The Quest for Quantity Phase.  How many friends do you have?  How many in your LinkedIn network?  You ping everybody.
3. And finally, The Quest for Quality Phase. You may know what someone’s kids ate for breakfast this morning, but that doesn’t really mean much if you haven’t actually spent one minute of time with that person in 6 years.

My personal evolution toward the Quality Phase in 2009 means kicking off the Facebook crutches for a while and really connecting with the people I care about - phone calls, lunches, and after-dinner drinks. It’s amazingly rewarding to reconnect with people that you’ve only seen online for years!  Three weeks ago we used Facebook to organize a JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL reunion.  Needless to say, it was so much fun.  And on my way home from work last night, I called a college roommate at her home in Michigan.  She almost fainted.  Were we really talking?!  We laughed for hours.  Something I could never recreate on her Wall.

That’s my evolution.  My sister-in-law’s evolution toward quality meant shutting off Facebook all together.  What’s yours?

Postscript for my sister-in-law and all of you who are wondering:  If you de-friend someone on Facebook, the person does NOT get any proactive notification that an event has occurred.  Your face just quietly disappears from their friend list…

Happy Holidays from everyone here at Scout Labs!

If my mom, my dad, my Aunt Mary, or anyone under the age of 60 actually read blogs beyond the Huffington Post, I would be worried that this post would blow my Christmas surprise, but I think I’m safe. I just ordered $2K worth of shoes for them from Zappos. I bought everyone multiple pairs and figured they’d get to keep one and that would be their present.

It’s not the down economy that is making me buy my relatively affluent relatives new shoes for Christmas. Nor do they “need” new shoes, per se. It’s that a) I’m a working mom and have NO time to shop anyplace but online and b) my favorite online shopping site is Zappos. I love the richness of the customer reviews, which help me feel like I’ve hit on just the thing for mom’s size 5 narrows, dad’s size 11 wides, and Aunt Mary’s bunions. I love the wide selection, so I can get a couple backup pairs. I love the free shipping both ways policy, and the well- engineered returns process, which makes buying from them so painless that the only shoes I’ve purchased elsewhere in the last 5 years have been bike shoes and Campers, neither of which they carry (I blame this on Camper). What also strikes me, after reading literally hundred of reviews of shoes in pursuit of the pair that will alleviate Aunt Mary’s suffering, is how almost EVERY review, whatever it says about the shoes, has to mention how great Zappos is. Here’s a random sampling of the Twitter stream:

just signed up for to be a Zappos VIP - free overnight shipping “till the cows come home!” yay!
less than 30 minutes ago
Kids Nike Skeet Jr. !! JUST MY SIZE!!! http://zeta.zappos.com/product/7416570/color/150475
less than 30 minutes ago
I did indeed sign up for Zappos VIP I have a pair of boots I’d like… will have to try it after next paycheck
less than 30 minutes ago
roxyyo, @jbillingsley, Great tip on adding live chat to 404 pages. We’re adding it to our Zappos Zeta 404 page: http://zeta.zappos.com/show
less than 30 minutes ago
zappos really is un-frickin-real in their access to consumers. Serious kudos to you guys for re-defining customer care
about 1 hour ago

Zappos is doing a great job of active listening- they have listened to what customers wanted and proactively given it to them, from free shipping to live chat on 404 pages. It seems like a cool place to work though I’m not sure how successful they will be in commoditizing their way of doing business. But compare this to Target, which also has great merchandise and where I actually began my holiday shopping journey:

• Items recommended for Christmas were not available to ship for 2-4 weeks (Um, it’s December 17)
• 7 out of my 8 items were eligible for free shipping, but the eighth one wasn’t, so they wanted to charge me shipping for the whole cart (Um, I PUT some of those things in only because they had free shipping)
• When I tried to find a place to complain, I got a web form. Really makes me feel the love.

Apparently I’m not the only one feeling a lack of love these days: Why ban mobile price checking? And check out this random dip into the Twitter stream for Target. Where is the customer joy?

while wearing a red sweater at target, a fellow customer asked me for help.
less than 15 minutes ago
Has to go to target before work to replace the christmas lights he broke last night.
less than 15 minutes ago
DealNews: Battery-Operated 4-Piece Flickering Tealight Candles for $14 + free shipping: Target offers t.. http://tinyurl.com/5cjpbn
less than 15 minutes ago
heading to target
less than 15 minutes ago
here’s my thing though…i need to stop at target to get a few finishing touches to my gift for my boss tomorrow.
Stupid Target.
less than 30 minutes ago
never going to Target in Newbury Park again… yuck.
less than 30 minutes ago

I’m just sorry to hear that Zappos, like so many other internet companies, in this down economy, trimmed their team. Hope it doesn’t erode the CS that has their customers constantly reviewing, blogging and tweeting about them.

Merry Christmas Zappos- you got my whole holiday budget.

PS: The new shopping interface is a definite improvement, but still needs some work. CALL ME!

We have been widening access to the Scout Labs beta application over the last few months and will be adding a lot more companies more quickly, now.  There are over one hundred companies using the application right now, and we will be adding dozens more each week.  The reason for the delay?  We are in beta for one reason: to get high quality feedback so that we can optimize the product prior to commercial launch (early 2009).  We have needed to manage the number of companies in the app closely to make sure we have the resources to monitor usage, answer questions, and have conversations with each company to get the detailed feedback we need.  Now, with a bigger customer service team and more automation (web-based survey, better internal usage metrics, feedback buttons throughout the app which automatically go into a bug-tracking queue for our product teams’ review, etc.), we are able to bring companies on more quickly.  We will get to everyone on the waiting list eventually, but, gratefully, it is a very long list, so feel free to remind us of your continued interest, either here or in an email to beta <at> scoutlabs <dot> com.

We know many of you have been waiting for a long time and we thank you for your patience.

Hi! My name is Julie. I recently joined the Customer Support team at Scout Labs. I am very excited to be here, as I feel this product has incredible potential. (Obviously! otherwise I wouldn’t be here!) A reminder to current beta users: feel free to send any questions or comments you may have about Scout Labs to me at beta scoutlabs com, as I am here to help you get the most out of using the app. To those of you who have requested access and are still waiting, we will be extending access to you soon! It’s a promise.

I also look forward to blogging about interesting events in the social media monitoring space. So I just had to post about ‘Motrin Moms’ – the most recent ‘big story’ of corporate social-media-mismanagement.

Motrin ran an ad online and in print this fall regarding ‘baby wearing’, which is a term for carrying a baby in a sling, BabyBjorn, or one of those backpack-type devices. The ad claims that it is painful for moms to carry babies this way, and reminds moms that Motrin can help relieve the pain. I’m not a mom, so I do not really know how offensive this could be, but apparently, it was REALLY offensive to A LOT of moms. They banded together with brute 2.0 force, and within days of the ad being aired, there were droves of moms Twittering and Blogging and Vlogging in outrage. Motrin, slow in their response, did not even acknowledge the movement until weeks later. When they did notice, they had no choice but to take the ad offline, but not before serious brand damage was done. They probably lost a lot of current customers, and more importantly, future customers. Mothers, being the major purchasers within households, are not a good group to alienate. (After all, that was why they created the ad in the first place – to try and “connect” with this valuable market segment.) AdAge did a great job covering the episode, here.

This is a great example of why a service like Scout Labs should be mandatory for any company putting messages out in to the world. It is essential to put out these fires before they get out of control.

No one within range of a TV, radio or computer could have missed seeing recent news about last week’s vicious paramilitary attacks on civilians throughout Mumbai. There was a great deal of footage from the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, which as one of Mumbai’s flagship luxury hotels was targeted for attack as a symbol of India’s amicable relationship with the modern (and Western) world. I took a look at the most frequent words appearing in a Taj Hotels search in the Scout Labs tool today and found:

• Terrorists
• Hostages
• Attacks
• Police
• Armed
• Killed
• Gunmen
• Fire
• Dead

How sad. The top words pre-attack were:

• India
• Indian
• Luxury
• Mumbai
• Hotel
• Business
• Guests
• Palace
• New

Taj Hotels has put up a special site with press releases, contacts, and help for guests- phone numbers to call, a procedure for retrieving bags, priority service for getting back passports. There are also denials of employee involvement, blustery statements about rebuilding, and promises to take care of employees who were injured in the attack or are out of work as a result of it. No one could reasonably have expected to defend a bustling luxury hotel in a peaceful civil society from a full scale military attack. Nevertheless the Taj group is going to have to spend a lot of time and money dealing with the impact to the operations and to their brand.

I wonder if they realize that one of the best ways for them to acknowledge and cope with this tragedy are to let their affected guests, employees, and employee’s families testify as to what went on in the hotel during the attack- and how the Taj Group handled them afterwards. Already personal stories are making the rounds, like this survivor’s account posted on Facebook. If the Taj group can exemplify the values of compassion, service, and dignity, this tragic attack need not be the swansong for this landmark hotel.

The global economy is in something much bigger than a “slump”.  Consumers (wisely) aren’t spending, so company revenues are plummeting.  But despite this very clear reality, and many indicators that this will last for quite some time, I am still reading calls to marketers to NOT cut spending.  Of course, these pleas come from advertising firm execs.

The primary rationale given is the old: if you invest while everyone else cuts spend, you will gain share.  “My tip for advertisers is to be bold and maintain your spend if you can.  That way, you will increase your share of voice as your competitors reduce theirs,” says Guy Phillipson, chief executive, Internet Advertising Bureau.  Well, you won’t necessarily gain share, so that strategy a pretty big gamble unless you are sitting on a whole lot of cash.  And most of the examples cited by proponents of the “spend more” strategy (Heinz in 2001, Hersey this year) are actually examples of portfolio companies with multiple brands (or markets) who increased spend on a few flagship brands (or markets) while sacrificing the budgets of others.  I see those as examples of overall cost decreases and tough decision-making, not permission to spend like crazy.

Then there’s the argument(?): well, it just kinda makes sense.  “You still need to advertise. Consumers are still living and breathing and they still need to buy products,” says Brendan Condon, managing director, international, Platform-A (a “one-stop advertising shop” by AOL).

Puleeze.  If your revenues are dropping, your costs should drop too.  That means think critically about every marketing dollar you spend, and maybe even change up your strategy for revenue creation:

1)    Make sure that demand creation / acquisition is really the right place to invest right now.  To hit your revenue targets, you could pour money into getting more people into the marketing funnel.  But would your money be better spent this year investing more heavily in improving the product, thereby improving your conversion rate among the people who come and try?  Here’s one prescient advertising exec that I do agree with - David Roddick, commercial director, Northcliffe Media, who said, “Make sure you’re absolutely focused on delivering value and then that you are maintaining your audiences,”

2)    Make the most of the customers you have.  You already did the hard (and expensive) work of winning them as customers.  Consider investing in loyalty programs and cross-sell / up-sell initiatives.

3)    Insist on doing more with less.  Look for lower-cost marketing solutions and hunt for advertising bargains.  Consider bringing in-house functions that you used to outsource.  Marketing doesn’t have to be expensive to be effective.

Skyrocketing oil prices earlier this year caused a massive shift in consumer behavior (driving less and buying fewer Hummers) that was extremely rapid and likely permanent.  If we marketers are forced to get smarter about how we spend marketing money and start building better products, there is at least a silver lining to this recession.

We all say it. And we say it like everyone knows what we mean. But I’m always surprised at how differently people think about what a brand is and what it takes to “build it”. Some (by no means all) design shops will tell you that your brand is your logo and tagline, so you’d better invest heavily. Some advertising agencies will tell you it’s how much advertising you have in market. A PR firm will say your brand is what influencers say about you. There’s some truth to each of these perspectives. I believe a brand is the relationship a customer has with a company. And like any relationship you have in your life, it’s defined by the sum total of all the experiences and interactions over time. You can’t craft a brand by writing a mission statement and saying, “We are a company that cares about X.” You need to go be a company that is X. It’s not your logo. It’s all that you are. 

Far-reaching definition, to be sure. But think about some of the strong brands you know. For me, Apple is about well-designed technology. And I feel that way because all the Apple products I experience are functional and powerful enough for what I need them for. They’re intuitive to use, show great attention to detail, feel good in my hands, and garner compliments from my design friends. The Apple employees I know are the most creative, talented folks I have worked with in the past. The company’s stores are innovative, high-tech, and the help is both knowledgeable and super cool. Its marketing is simple, creative and (usually) powerful – (I actually think Apple’s brand advertising in recent years is the LEAST creative/innovative thing about the company in some ways). But it’s all of this that makes Apple = well-designed technology, for me. Its chomped-fruit logo has nothing to do with it. 

Ask anyone about the Zappos brand and they will say Zappos = great service. It’s tagline is not, “We’re all about service.” Zappos = great service because of its liberal returns policy, free shipping in both directions, all the detailed information on its site (“these shoes run a little small / large for the size”), and all the great interactions customers have with its service staff. My husband ordered 3 pairs of shoes from Zappos. None fit or they weren’t quite cool enough, so he sent them all back. He then ordered another 3 pairs of shoes. No keepers again. He wanted to order another batch but wondered if he should be feeling bad about sending back yet another set for full credit. He called customer service and asked if it was really OK. Not only did the customer support person say, “YES, absolutely! That’s what we are here for!” But to thank him for being thoughtful about it, she gave him a $20 gift certificate toward a pair of shoes (if he ever found ones that fit). Again, it’s not good luck that Zappos has support people like that. Zappos actually pays customer support people $1,000 to quit, one week into training. If anyone is NOT totally committed – NOT in it for the long-haul – they’d rather know sooner rather than later. 

Brands are earned through consistent actions and interactions, and once built, they are not easy to change. Microsoft has had a tough time putting out the Zune and trying to suddenly be a hip and cool brand. Yes, there is Xbox, but we customers have too many experiences with Microsoft over many years to suddenly believe it’s hip. It’s like one of the un-cool kids on your block who’ve you known your whole life to be un-cool, suddenly showing up at the senior year grad night party in a sa-weet party suit. Maybe in the movies the guy gets the popular girl that night, but not in real life. That guy better show up at the cool coffee shop every day, show up at more cool parties, and STOP being seen playing D&D on the school lawn at lunch if he’s going to really change his brand. 

So brands are, indeed, BUILT. They are built every day, every time your customer interacts with your product or service – the store, the product, the packaging, the receipt. Your brand is defined by the conversations customers have with your people. It’s defined by your pricing decisions, your policy decisions, your hiring decisions and your training programs. It’s the website, the phone tree, and yes, I guess it’s also that logo on your business card.

The Business Technology blog over at WSJ reports on a recent study of more than 100 corporate social networks. Ed Moran, a Deloitte consultant, found that:

Thirty-five percent of the online communities studied have less than 100 members; less than 25% have more than 1,000 members – despite the fact that close to 60% of these businesses have spent over $1 million on their community projects.

Moran’s conclusion is that companies get seduced by the technologies involved without understanding the terrain. These sites fail, he believes, because companies don’t invest enough money or manpower in supporting them, and because the things the companies measure don’t really align with their professed business goals.

The title of the article - “Why Most Online Communities Fail” - is misleading, since Moran is talking specifically about corporate social networks, and the very premise of these sites is flawed if you ask me. I haven’t seen the list of companies he looked at, but I would guess that most of them actually have thriving online “communities” whose activities just happen to be distributed across the Internet. People are twittering. They’re posting about those 100 companies on their blogs and MySpace pages.

I understand the urge that companies have to contain this activity, but it’s a pipe dream. You can build the snazziest playground in the world, and most of your community still won’t show up. If you want to connect with them, you have to do it on their turf. If you want to quantify their effect on your brand perception or your sales numbers, you have to find tools that can do that.

That’s what we’re aiming to provide of course, and that’s why I believe in this product. Companies are willing to spend millions on the fantasy that they can bring their communities to them because they don’t have very good ways of tuning in to the communities that are already out there.

But that’s changing.

Two weeks ago, our family went to Disneyland – the first visit for my 5 year-old girl, Fiona, and 3 year-old boy, Rowan. The kids were appropriately dumbfounded. They are still talking about how cool it was to see REAL Tinkerbell fly from the Matterhorm to the castle to start the fireworks show. They are still talking bragging to the checkers at the grocery store that they went on Thunder Mountain Railroad and Splash Mountain. Fiona is still dreamily recalling how wonderful it was to hug and banter with Belle, Ariel, Snow White, Cinderella and others at our “Disney Princess Breakfast” (Of course, poor Rowan thought that we were going to eat Disney Princesses, which explained his terror as we headed out that morning).

But I’m still talking about the trip too. What an amazing “product”.

1. Brilliant vision. Walt Disney had a vision for a family entertainment park that was so extensive and so complete, that even 50 years later, nothing has even come close to it in the world. Like Steve Jobs – or Ghandi or Martin Luther King Jr., for that matter – Walt Disney was “all in”. He wasn’t doing a job. He found his “calling” and his work was an unconditional commitment. He worked tirelessly – obsessively – to bring his vision to life.

2. A complete experience. Disney has thought of everything. For example, when you order you tickets in advance, you receive a “welcome packet” for the family to open together around the dinner table. Pins, pictures, magical coins, an array of gleaming, beautifully-designed credit-card-like tickets, each one with a different character on them, plus a hand-written note from the person who prepared the packet for us: “I sprinkled extra fairy dust on this packet so that your trip will be the happiest of all. Jesse”. OK, if you don’t have kids that will sound incredibly corny, but to the rest of you – you know. They make it easy and fun to buy the product (Disney Vacation packages), they build excitement before you even get access to the product, and deliver an experience which is really beyond your family’s wildest dreams.

3. Execution with excruciating attention to detail. When we entered the park on the first day, we used our gleaming, credit-card-like tickets to enter the Main Gate. You scan your ticket under a barcode reader, but instead of hearing “BEEP” or “EH!!!”, we heard “Tinkle tinkle ting!!!” – the sound of Tinkerbell’s magic wand. How cool is that? The next day, we eager ly pushed though the Main Gate for day 2, and when we scanned our tickets this time we heard Jimeney Cricket’s laugh. OK, so Disney called the barcode scanner vendor and said, “I don’t want a beep sound. I want a catalog of sounds that we can upload and cycle through at different times on different days”. How much did that add to the cost of their entry system? Which brings me to…

4. An obsessive focus on product, not profitability. After exploring caves on Tom Sawyer’s island one afternoon, we headed back via raft to the dock at New Orleans Square. As we came off the raft, I noticed a man, dressed in swarthy coats leaning against a fence, playing a penny whistle. He wasn’t talking to anyone or doing much. But his presence – the lonely sound of his instrument and his old tarnished, (Disney) pocketwatch – transformed the place. In fact, Walt even invested in details that very few people ever even noticed. “Hidden Mickeys” are everywhere in Disneyland and their spotters form an elite community of fanatics. . A cost-cutting consultant would show up at Disneyland and have a field day. But they don’t show up at Disneyland, which is the point.

5. Operational excellence. Disneyland hosts 14.7 million guests per year. It is open every day of the year, some nights closing at midnight and opening at 8am. And at 8am, every morning, the place is immaculate. Everything is where it should be. Every piece of trash is picked up (I checked one day – that little ice cream wrapper in the corner of the castle moat was indeed gone at 8am the next morning). No paint is ever faded. And every cast member is “on”. Who cleans the moat at 2am? And when does Tinkerbell practice her zip-line “flight” from Matterhorn to castle? There must be a fake Disneyland / training ground somewhere where she can train? The scale, scope and level of quality is inspiring.

6. A team of people who live the vision every day. “Ahoy sailors! Looks like good weather for our voyage!” We are genuinely, honestly greeted this way by cast member Paul as we weave our way closer to the Finding Nemo Submarine Adventure. He is not tired, but downright jolly – not the way most people look at 3pm on a work day. This is the result of rigorous hiring and training practices as well as creative scheduling and staffing – cast members do only short shifts on any given ride to prevent monotony from setting in.

Obviously, modern Disneyland is the way it is because of the efforts of thousands of people, but Walt Disney started it all and grew a team with a similar quest for perfection. The following quotes from Walt Disney sum up his leadership style and approach to “product development”.

“Disneyland is a work of love. We didn’t go into Disneyland just with the idea of making money.”

“When we consider a project, we really study it–not just the surface idea, but everything about it. And when we go into that new project, we believe in it all the way. We have confidence in our ability to do it right. And we work hard to do the best possible job.”

“Whenever I go on a ride, I’m always thinking of what’s wrong with the thing and how it can be improved.”

“I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn’t know how to get along without it.”

“Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.”

Kids or no kids, I think it’s time to plan a trip to Disneyland…